Lots of BoingBoing posts have a comments link which instead of linking to the comments points straight back to the article you’re reading
It happens so often that it’s either a common bug in BoingBoing’s blogging software or a bad piece of UI design which makes it easy for posters to make a particular mistake
I managed to get to the comments by taking the URL of the article and prefacing boingboing with “bbs.” and substituting the date section “/2022/12/06/” with “/t/”
…but other people had posted there without any fuss. Did it work for them?
Now that you’ve posted here, you should probably go ahead and delete the off topic part from the other thread. The problem you describe tends to pop up once in a while, but someone from Discourse can probably explain better than me. The staff looks at this thread pretty often.
What does “activity” mean in a topic list? It looks like the list is sorted by most recent activity, no? But it’s not necessarily a reply. For example:
If I reply to a post and the original post to which I have replied is later deleted by its author, is there any way that I could get a notice letting me know that the original post is now gone for good (i.e. after 12 hours)? Depending on how I responded, my reply could become meaningless without the original post to which it is replying.
This is a good argument for quoting the relevant bits of the post when you reply; that way a parent deletion won’t orphan your response. It is a bit more work, so maybe specifically for your more important or significant (to you) replies? Or ones where you feel there is a risk of the parent being deleted, e.g. the poster has a history of self-deleting posts for whatever reason.
Aside: are we regularly replying to posts that get deleted? Is … that a good idea? I just noticed you said “deleted by author” so this doesn’t apply. My bad. I should have read more closely.
I always quote the relevant text unless my post is immediately below the original post in the thread, in which case it feels a bit excessive to quote. It doesn’t happen very often, but like in the case above:
The person did so, but I didn’t know that they had, so it left my post pointing that user to this thread on the original thread without context. I didn’t get flagged for it or anything, but I technically could have been.
This is my favourite feature in the whole forum. I’m terrible about missing words or critical punctuation, no matter how many times I proofread before hitting Post. The slightly different formatting of the real post always alerts me to a word that my brain filled in but I didn’t actually write. If not for the grace period, every post of mine would be 5✏️
CCBOD is a very old bug and sadly the consensus seems to be there is nothing that can be done about it. I’m not sure why, but it’s a very well known bug so presumably if it was easily fixed it would have been by now.
It seems to go in waves- it’ll vanish for a while, then every freaking post will have it for a few days. Certain authors also seem to be worse than others. For me, Popkin’s posts are CCBOD 100% of the time. Whatever they do when they post seems to repro it reliably.
Actually a new theory after thinking about it. It seems like after posting, a thread is provisioned in the bbs with an id. Could it be that:
Post is made
Request is made to provision bbs comment thread with a short timeout.
If step 2 completes within the timeout, post is updated with link to comment thread.
If step 2 doesn’t complete within timeout, post is never updated with link. Step 2 always completes, but sometimes not fast enough for the timeout @orenwolf?
ETA:
And thinking out loud here, since it seems like the bbs links work even without the id as part of the url… maybe set the comments link to bbs.boingboing.net/t/slug link on initial post (where slug is based on the title) so whether there is a timeout or not, it goes to the right place.
Not exactly that, but I’ve been getting a weird flickering of the whole thread as I scroll through, occasionally. It does seem to be more common when there are gifs on the screen. Wonder if it’s related.
It flickers a bunch then kicks me back up to before where I began scrolling.
I’m usually on a tablet, but it’s happened on my laptop, too.
Yes it’s totally this. There are a few suggested fixes but none we’ve tried to implement yet since they involve firing hooks back at the discourse plug-in.
